Three Common Types of Medical Malpractice

When you’re hurt by a medical professional, you may be struggling to get answers about your lawsuit. You may even be unsure what type of medical malpractice claim you’re facing, making a recovery more difficult. 

If a doctor, specialist, pharmacist, nurse, or any other medical professional caused you or your loved one’s injury or harm, it’s likely to involve one of the following common types of medical malpractice. Talk to your lawyer at Spencer Calahan Injury Lawyers to determine the type of medical malpractice you’re facing. 

Failure to Diagnose

Diagnosis is the first stage you go through when you visit a hospital for treatment. When there’s an issue of negligence during diagnosis, every other medical decision made down the line is then based on problematic information. 

Some diseases are difficult to detect, which may not always amount to negligence. Failure to diagnose becomes medical malpractice when a doctor deviates from standard medical standards that another doctor would provide and causes harm. Examples include:

• Failure to order for particular tests
• Failure to diagnose the correct illness
• Failure to obtain a patient’s medical history
• Failure to discern any disease at all when the patient is ill

All of these lead to a delayed diagnosis or lack of treatment. When treatment occurs, it might be unnecessary and more expensive than what you’re supposed to pay. 

Even though an accurate diagnosis may be carried out later, you’ve already suffered and your pain and suffering have been prolonged by your doctor’s carelessness. 

Birth Injuries

Birth injuries occur during labor, delivery, or shortly after. In some cases, the negligent action leading to the injuries may have even occurred before, during prenatal care. Birth injuries can affect the newborn, the mother, or both parties.

Negligent actions that lead to birth injuries include:

• Failure to recognize signs of distress in the mother or newborn
• Failure to monitor vital signs before, during, and after delivery
• Improper use of birth assistive tools, like forceps
• Anesthesia errors
• Failure to perform a cesarean section that could save the mother or child
• Insufficient or improper prenatal care

Some injuries caused by negligence during birth are fractured bones, brain damage, brachial palsy, severe bleeding, uterine inversion, vaginal tears, and even loss of life. These injuries cause pain and extended hospital stays. Other birth injuries are long-term, requiring lifelong care. If you’ve suffered one of these injuries, you may have grounds for a lawsuit. 

Medication Errors

After explaining your health complications to a healthcare provider, you expect that their medical knowledge is enough to determine the right treatment. This is not always the case, unfortunately.  

The most common outcome of a pharmaceutical error is allergic reactions such as rashes, itchiness, skin disfigurement, headaches, and stomach-related complications. In extreme cases, such errors cause hospitalization and even death. 

Most mistakes during medication occur because of miscommunication between a doctor and a pharmacist. Other causes include:

• Administering the wrong medication
• Incorrect dosages
• Failure to check patient information to prevent drug interaction issues
• Failure to warn patients of a drug’s side effects
• Mislabelled medication

How to Identify the Type of Medical Malpractice in Your Case

Claims involving medical malpractice are more complex than other types of personal injury cases. First, interpreting the subject matter must involve an expert witness from the medical field even before you can file a claim. Second, healthcare providers and institutions rarely admit fault in such cases because doing so threatens their careers. 

The other reason is that medical malpractice is broad. Various forms of negligence fall under different categories of medical malpractice, depending on where in the hospital they occurred. 

Some types of medical malpractice are easy to identify, while others are not. For instance, if you’re hospitalized with stomach pains after ingesting a drug, you could be dealing with a medication error claim. However, it can be challenging to determine whether some other malpractice-related health problems happened during medication or diagnosis.

The only sure way to identify the medical malpractice claim you should be filing is by speaking with a medical expert, who may later serve as a witness in your case. When you partner with a medical malpractice attorney, they’ll speak with experts and do all the legwork so you can focus on recovering. 

Talk with a Medical Malpractice Lawyer

Birth injuries, failure to diagnose a patient, and medication errors are some of the common forms of medical malpractice. The experienced attorneys at Spencer Calahan Injury Lawyers are here to help patients pursue compensation for these cases.  

Filing a claim against negligent medical providers provides the financial resources you need to recover. You’ll also be protecting other patients from substandard care and possible harm. To discuss your medical malpractice case through a free consultation, call us at 225-387-2323 or complete the online contact form at the bottom of this page.